Peak Experience of the Holographic Universe.

As I sat there, I was struck by the closeness of the purple hills in the distance, or rather, the feeling that they were close. The same perception applied to the few puffs of white cloud drifting overhead. I felt as if I could reach out and touch them with my hand.

As I reached up toward the sky, I noticed something different about the way my body felt. My arm had glided upward with incredible ease and I was holding my back, neck and head perfectly straight with absolutely no effort. From my position-sitting cross-legged-I stood up without using my arms, and stretched. The feeling was one of total lightness.

Looking at the distant mountains, I noticed that a daytime moon had been out and was about to set. It looked to be about a quarter full and hung over the horizon like an inverted bowl. Instantly I understood why it had that shape. The sun, millions of miles directly above me, was shining only on the top of the sinking moon. I could perceive the exact line between the sun and the lunar surface, and this recognition somehow extended my consciousness outward even farther.

I could imagine the moon having already dipped below the horizon and the exact reflected shape it would present to those who lived further west and could still see it. Then I imagined how it would look when it moved directly under me on the other side of the planet. To the people there, it would appear full because the sun over my head would shine past the Earth and strike the moon squarely.

This picture sent a rush of sensation up my spine, and my back seemed to straighten even more as I conceived, no, I experienced, the same amount of space commonly felt over my head as also existing under my feet, on the other side of the globe. For the first time in my life, I knew the earth’s roundness not as an intellectual concept but as an actual sensation.

At one level this awareness excited me but at another it seemed perfectly ordinary and natural. All I wanted to do was immerse myself in the feeling of being suspended, floating, amid a space that existed in all directions. Rather than having to push myself away from the Earth with my legs as I stood there, resisting the Earth’s gravity, I now felt as though I was held up by some inner buoyancy, as though I was filled like a balloon with just enough helium to hover over the ground and barely touch it with my feet. It was similar to being in perfect athletic condition, as after a year of intense exercise, only far more coordinated and light.

I sat down again on the rock, and, again, everything seemed close: the rugged outcrop on which I was sitting, the tall trees further down the slope and the other mountains on the horizon. And as I watched the limbs of the trees sway gently in the breeze, I experienced not just a visual perception of the event, but a physical sensation as well, as if the limbs moving in the wind were hairs on my body.

I perceived everything to be somehow part of me. As I sat on the peak of the mountain looking out at the landscape falling away from me in all directions, it felt exactly as if what I had always known as my physical body was only the head of a much larger body consisting of everything else I could see. I experienced the entire universe looking out on itself through my eyes.

This perception induced a flash of memory. My mind raced backward in time, past the beginning of my trip to Peru, past my childhood and my birth. The realization was present that my life did not, in fact, begin with my conception and birth on this planet. It began much earlier with the formation of the rest of me, my real body, the universe itself.

The science of evolution had always bored me, but now, as my mind continued to race backward in time, all the things I had read on the subject began to come back to me, including conversations with the friend who resembled Reneau. I recalled that this was the field he was interested in: evolution.

All knowledge seemed to merge with actual memories. Somehow I was recalling what had happened, and the recollection allowed me to look at evolution in a new way.

I watched as the first matter exploded into the universe, and I realized, as the Third Insight had described, that there was nothing truly solid about it. Matter was only energy vibrating at a certain level, and in the beginning matter existed only in its simplest vibratory form: the element we call hydrogen. That’s all there was in the universe, just hydrogen.

I observed the hydrogen atoms begin to gravitate together, as if the ruling principle, the urge, of this energy was to begin a movement into a more complex state. And when pockets of this hydrogen reached a sufficient density, it began to heat up and to burn, to become what we call a star, and in this burning the hydrogen fused together and leaped into the next higher vibration, the element we call helium.

As I continued to watch, these first stars aged and finally blew themselves up and spewed the remaining hydrogen and the newly created helium out into the universe. And the whole process began again. The hydrogen and helium gravitated together until the temperature became hot enough for new stars to form and that in turn fused the helium together, creating the element lithium, which vibrated at the next higher level.

And so on … each successive generation of stars creating matter that had not existed before, until the wide spectrum of matter-the basic chemical elements-had been formed and scattered everywhere. Matter had evolved from the element hydrogen, the simplest vibration of energy, to carbon, which vibrated at an extremely high rate. The stage was now set for the next step in evolution.

As our sun formed, pockets of matter fell into orbit around it, and one of them, the Earth, contained all the newly created elements, including carbon. As the Earth cooled, gases once caught in the molten mass migrated to the surface and merged together forming water vapor, and the great rains came, forming oceans on the then barren crust. Then when water covered much of the Earth’s surface, the skies cleared and the sun, burning brightly, bathed the new world with light and heat and radiation.

And in the shallow pools and basins, amid the great lightening storms that periodically swept the planet, matter leaped past the vibratory level of carbon to an even more complex state: to the vibration represented by the amino acids. But for the first time, this new level of vibration was not stable in and of itself. Matter had to continually absorb other matter into itself in order to sustain its vibration. It had to eat. Life, the new thrust of evolution, had emerged.

Still restricted to living only in water, I saw this life split into two distinct forms. One from the one we call plants-lived on inorganic matter, and turned these elements into food by utilizing carbon dioxide from the early atmosphere. As a by-product, plants released free oxygen into the world for the first time. Plant life spread quickly through the oceans and finally onto the land as well.

The other form – what we call animals – absorbed only organic life to sustain their vibration. As I watched, the animals filled the oceans in the great age of fishes, and, when the plants had released enough oxygen into the atmosphere, began their own trek toward land.

I saw the amphibians – half fish, half something new – leave the water for the first time and use lungs to breath the new air. Then matter leaped forward again into reptiles and covered the Earth in the great period of the dinosaurs. Then the warm-blooded mammals came and likewise covered the Earth, and I realized that each emerging species represented life-matter-moving into its next higher vibration. Finally, the progression ended. There at the pinnacle stood humankind.

Humankind. The vision ended. I had seen in one flash the entire story of evolution, the story of matter coming into being and then evolving, as if under some guiding plan, toward ever higher vibrations, creating the exact conditions, finally, for humans to emerge … for each of us, as individuals, to emerge.

As I sat there on that mountain, I could almost grasp how this evolution was extended even further in the lives of human beings. Further evolution was related somehow to the experience of life coincidences. Something about these events led us forward in our lives and created a higher vibration that pushed evolution ahead as well. Yet, as hard as I tried, I couldn’t quite understand.

For a long time I sat on the rock precipice, consumed by peace and completeness. Then, abruptly, I became aware that the sun was beginning to sink in the west. I got up and began the climb down the rocks. I laughed out loud. I was still connected with the landscape so that I felt I was walking alongside my own body, and more, that I was exploring the regions of my own body. The feeling was exhilarating.